I am lost, can I have your point of view?

I'm trying to analyze your product from the website (used Google Translate) and it seems there is no reason to limit it with French. It is not a local product. You can make its English version just in a day or two. Why are you limiting your product?

lifetime is not for life. dont worry.

Your main options to exit seem to be:

.. Find a buyer. You got 70 customers paying $300 each which is somewhat promising.

.. Give it away for free. Many social media marketing related companies might be interested in getting a new product.

.. Open source it, get enough sponsorships to pay the $200 monthly hosting bills, and then hand over to new maintainer.

.. Get a job and refund customers.

.. Shut it down and vanish. You take hit in moral self respect and public reputation. But probability of legal or financial consequences is low, although not zero.

Also, you'll get more replies if you don't write wall of irrelevant stuff about your personal history starting from age 13 :)

Good luck

Although I don't know the details, I think your application might have more potential than you think. 21k in revenue (70*300) is certainly not nothing, and if you've found that many in only the French market, then I can imagine you finding many more if you open it up to English speakers (or even just double down on France, hone your marketing, etc.).

It sounds like you've got three conflicting responsibilities: school, group admin, app. Might it be viable to take a semester off school and to pause your admin responsibilities so that you have 4 months to focus entirely on whether the business can grow?

Subscription isn't strictly necessary. Balsamiq made an awful lot of money with a one-time priced point. (It ended up in the tens of millions, but here's one of their first revenue announcement posts: https://blog.balsamiq.com/hit-100000-in-revenue-time-to-start-looking-up/). What matters is just that you have a way to keep getting new customers.

Maybe the business is worse than it sounds, I dunno. But it's usually easier to go from some revenue to lots of revenue than to start something new. Maybe there's a way to improve it if you can reduce your stress and increase your available time and focus (without burning bridges or destroying your ability to continue with your education and group when you want to, of course).

An alternate possibility is to say fuck it, soak up the extra 200/m as a cost of living, focus on graduating, get a job with a real salary, and then that 200/m won't seem like such a big deal, and you can make a more relaxed decision about it.

Anyway, I don't know the details of your situation, so please ignore/adjust as appropriate for where you're at. Best wishes with it.

If you have less than 100-lifetime subscribers, this is what I suggest that you do:

1. Get your act together and draw you a business model you can really keep up with that will be healthy for your finance.

2. Estimate how long the new build or remodel of the old build will take.

3. Potatoes always 'gon potate so just do this anyway even if a number of users will be rightly vexed:
   -send a heartfelt message across to your paid subscribers, individually. And make an announcement to the general public via a blog post, that there will be a temporal shut down so the company may implement updates to serve all and sundry better.

4. Make known to The Paid Folks that there would be incentives for them even if everything becomes monthly subscription-based, they'll get at list a sub-service that will be an equivalent for a lifetime of free while to others, it will be paid. If it's a remodel.

If it's seemingly a new service, even if it's going to bring some losses, just let them have at least 85% of the new service for free for about 6months the least, if it's really a useful one, be rest assured they'll stay, resubscribe after compensation is done.

Relaunch. Better. Wiser.

Goodluck Champ!

It best to focus and prioritize in a situation like that.

People tend to joke about those who "wanna get rich" because usually people with that mindset tend to chose to work on projects that seem easy in the short term and make short sighted decisions which might make a quick buck but don't actually don't make much sense in the long term. Then they then to buckle under the pressure when they realize the gravity of their situation and being not properly motivated to overcome the hole they dug themselves, quit by finding some excuse for failure (much easier to do).

The way to "get rich" is to work on a project that you really enjoy that you think has potential to be profitable. Tenacity and persistence is a big part of success and most of the "books about mindset, business and everything" should have mentioned that very successful people in pursuit of their goals/ideas spend a lot of time thinking about what ideas are important to them, and once they decide they simply dedicate themselves to it. My argument is that the idea simply "to make money" is not going to be a strong enough motivator for you to have the type of tenacity required to work and think relentlessly and take the enormous risks of which the end result is only rarely "money". From a normal persons point of view this work and risk seems irrational - they would much rather go to business school and work at a huge corporation or rely on some other such entity that will subsidize them and hedge their downside risk.

From a tactical point of view, its obvious a few naive critical business mistakes have been made (selling lifetime subscriptions without a solid business strategy, not knowing how difficult it would be to scale, limiting your market, over-promising & under-delivering etc.). If I was given this position my options would be to either find a better product/business model or rip the band-aid off and learn from my mistakes and do better next time.

Hey Mat!
If you still feel working on your app, I would love to check it.
Maybe I could sponsor you while you continue developing the app, in exchange of some share for example.
Let me know, my e-mail is in my profile.

Anything that is stressful in your life get rid of it. I agree with the others that lifetime means as long as the business is running. In the scheme of things $300 isn’t too much... however, you need to be respectful. I would be transparent and tell the truth that you can’t afford to do it anymore. I like the idea of giving it away or making it open source too. Out of interest did you try selling it? If it’s a good idea and only needs someone with the capacity and skills to run it then maybe they will.

Nobody wants to read that? :p